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Comment by kbenson | Hacker News Reader

This post, and how it explains that there's 30 people working there now, made me realize that if I care about signal continuing (and I do, since I really like it, especially that it has a dedicated desktop client), that I should see how it makes money and whether that's sustainable. Turns out it's donations, and now I'm a donor through monthly charges through the mobile app. I actually opted for that specifically because their web site noted that they can't give you a badge in the app if you donate online, and I thought showing the badge would be a good way for other people to see and inquire about, and hopefully realize they can donate too if they care to.

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While this is true, remember that the Signal Foundation was started with a sizeable investment from their new interim CEO Brian Acton.

> In February of 2018, Acton invested $50 million of his own money to start the Signal Foundation alongside Moxie Marlinspike > > https://signalfoundation.org/en/

He's worth at least a billion dollars, so one imagines that Signal will continue as long as he's involved.

You can't take him for granted like that. Yeah he donated a lot and yeah he has more and yeah he left $1B on the table after leaving Facebook, but he just can't do it all alone.

If you're rich you get all kinds of people in your life soliciting your money, you gotta watch it like a hawk, it's easy to lose a billion dollars.

Good point. And he might also want to donate to other charities. There are many worthy causes besides Signal.

And it’s probably sound for Signal to not rely on one single wealthy donor.

> There are many worthy causes besides Signal

To be fair, that applies to non-billionaires as well.

Indeed!

> it's easy to lose a billion dollars

20 $50 million donations to various groups and $1 billion dollars is gone. You could probably do that in 5 years and still not come out as effective.

Sure but even a meagre 8% return on $950M is $76M. Buying and holding SP500 index funds in 2021 would have returned more than triple that, at 26% or so.

You can give away 50 mil a year and still get tens of millions dollars richer if you're sitting on $1B.

It's only "easy" to lose $1B if you have absolutely no idea what you're doing.

Since when is an 8% return "meagre"?! I get it, the last year had a crazy stock price increase, but it was an outlier.

The average SP500 return for the last 50 years is north of 10%, so I consider 8 to be meagre.

4%. 4% is the number. Don’t count on anything over this.

Is that 4% inflation-adjusted?

Usually yes. In times of inflating asset prices, the value of the investment tends to inflate with it.

Usually yes. But … not every year exactly, so it works best when viewed over a longer term.

The next 10 years? 0%. We’ll be lucky if the market is flat in the next decade.

10 year treasury bonds are essentially risk free, as they are guaranteed by the US Treasury. Current 10-year yields are a bit less than 2%, so that's essentially your minimum return there.

Assuming that interest rates remain above inflation, which is already no longer true. What's the point of earning 2% a year when the USD is losing 6% a year in value (and that's likely far undercounted).

The point is it's possibly the most secure investment available, so that's why it's a good proxy for the risk free rate.

Whether or not you want to invest at that rate is entirely a separate conversation.

A meager 8%. You have betrayed your total ignorance when it comes to anything having to do with money. You have no idea what you’re talking about. The only investment that will give you 8% is an extremely risky one and that’s not an appropriate vehicle for a billion dollars. And you say this in the world wide environment of negative interest rates…

The reason not many rich people lose their money is because becoming rich is hard and you have to be smart to do it. You don’t have to be good or moral but you have to be smart. Even then there’s a ton of washout among new millionaires. But you don’t get to a billion by accident. Look at all the people who make tons of money through some other means than intelligence — lottery winners and football players — they all lose their money even if it’s millions. Sorry bud, the system isn’t rigged. Life is just hard.

>The only investment that will give you 8% is an extremely risky one and that’s not an appropriate vehicle for a billion dollars.

Buying SPY returns on average 10% or so, year over year.

Do you consider the S&P500 to be "extremely risky"?

>Sorry bud, the system isn’t rigged.

I feel like you replied to the wrong person? Between you and I, the only one who brought up the question of whether "the system" is rigged or not is you.

The average american makes ~2m in a lifetime, 1b$ is 500x that. "Losing" 1b$ is ludicrous unless you are actively looking to lose it (or don't care about it, like musk & al).

How do you lose what 500 people make in their lifetime?

Look at what happens to lottery winners.

There’s a world of difference between a million and a billion.

Just physically moving that amount of cash is difficult and takes time. Even those lottery winners don’t blow the whole lot in less than a year.

> Just physically moving that amount of cash is difficult and takes time.

...that's why it isn't moved physically?

Yeah, but the average American also isn’t making $50 million donations to keep a pet project going.

Let's say your net worth is ~100k. That's equivalent to a 2.5k donation. Investing 2.5k in a pet project is pretty common, and you don't find yourself in the streets for doing so.

I think people that say it's easy to lose 2b$ don't have a clear understanding of the amount of money that is. It's a crazy amount for one person.

I think you’ve lost the context. If signal does not figure out revenue, they will require more $50MM donations. Using your analogy, that would be like you spending $5,000 or $10,000 when you originally only planned to spend $2,500. Perhaps you wouldn’t flinch, but many would pull the plug after the first or second time, especially if disappointed about some aspect of the project. Your project is at risk by relying on your continued good graces, even though you may technically be able to afford more investment. Likewise, signal is at risk if it requires periodic investment of millions from Acton, even though he can afford it and currently supports the project. Since he donated a few percent of his net worth, it’s a better situation than if he had donated, say, half, but signal still needs to take the risk seriously.

Forget it in your pants, and it went in the washing machine.

You know, same problem as everyone else, really.

That's why they're making all of the cash money plastic, so these billionaires can stop accidently laundering their money. Genius!

Or, you know, a one $1 billion dollars donation and it's gone as well :D

> it's easy to lose a billion dollars

With doors that go like this or this and not like this

> it's easy to lose a billion dollars.

Can you cite some examples? If it were easy, presumably a lot of people have done it.

Mike Tyson, Evander Holy field, I'd imagine there'd be a lot of boxers.

Many super-paid athletes famously end up broke very quickly after their careers end. Some NBA names here [0] but it's not specific to basketball - it typically correlates with coming from poverty and/or lack of financial education.

[0] https://www.thesportster.com/basketball/15-nba-players-who-w...

I wonder why they don't maintain any IP rights on their performances like actors or singers.

Vijay Mallya, Patricia Kluge, and Eike Batista are all entrepreneurs who lost a billion or more and are now worth nothing. Masayoshi Son lost $60 billion and only made back about $20 billion. Technically Bezos, Buffett, and Bill Gates have all lost billions many times, just due to market fluctuations, but that probably doesn't count. Mohammed bin Salman, the Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia, spends $1B like nothing: $500 million yacht, $300 million dollar house (one of many), $450 million on a painting. I'm certain that many members of that family have spent $1B or more.

You know what they say: a million here, a million there, pretty soon it adds up to real money.

Bill Hwang, revered as a God Of YOLO on WallStreetBets, once lost $20B in two days: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2021-08-09/where-is-...

> Can you cite some examples?

Alongside the other examples in this thread, Donald Trump lost at least $1b during the first two years of his term.

> If it were easy, presumably a lot of people have done it.

The easiest way to lose a billion is to start with more than a billion, and there aren't really a lot of people in that position.

> If you're rich you get all kinds of people in your life soliciting your money, you gotta watch it like a hawk, it's easy to lose a billion dollars.

People forget this far too often. No matter how much money a person or an organization has, it can disappear in the blink of an eye if you view it as an unlimited money pot that you can keep going back to.

Note that this was an unusual arrangement, to say the least. My understanding, from memory of having briefly looked into this, is that Acton loaned $50m to the Foundation, rather than donating it, in what appears to be a 50-year, interest-free loan with no regular repayments. As an initial donation of that size from an individual would have probably put the Signal Foundation into private foundation status rather than public charity status, this has at least the appearance of trying to circumvent the public support requirements of public charities.

It is somewhat difficult for one individual to consistently single-handedly support a charity in the US without causing the tax status of the organization to change detrimentally.

If they invest the 50M, and keep the team lean, it can be long-term sustainable.

But that---a $50m donation from an individual, then sustaining the organization off investing that donation---is exactly what, whether it makes sense or not, a public charity in the US is usually not allowed to do. That would make it a private foundation in the eyes of the IRS.

With that said, if I'm interpreting their 2019 filing correctly, it appears that they are making enough in donations that they may have a legitimate claim to being able to eventually repay the loan, and they are now including imputed interest on the (interest-free) loan as revenue.

There are provisions for individual large donations to be excluded from the public-support calculation if the charity can make the case that they are "unusual". No idea if that would apply here though.

From Wikipedia...

> The foundation was started with an initial $50 million loan from Acton, who had left WhatsApp's parent company, Facebook, in September 2017.[8] The Freedom of the Press Foundation had previously served as the Signal project's fiscal sponsor and continued to accept donations on behalf of the project while the foundation's non-profit status was pending.[4] By the end of 2018, the loan had increased to $105,000,400, which is due to be repaid on February 28, 2068. The loan is unsecured and at 0% interest.

Appears it wasn't an outright donation. I've always wondered about the details behind this. Don't think I've seen something like this before.

An unsecured, 0% interest loan with a 50 year term may as well be a donation.

It gives him more control over the org than a donation would have.

For all intents an purposes, he owns Signal. He's the org's benefactor, lender, founder, board member, and now CEO.

Giving money probably has some tax implications. Providing a loan does not.

This is technically true, but the donation would be tax advantageous over a loan, so I can't imagine that's the reason.

True. I saw your other post about control and that makes more sense.

It wasn't an outright donation as a protection mechanism. If they go full Oculus he wants his money back. If they remain true to the founding principals, it'll likely just be forgiven upon death or put into some funky trust.

People said the same about Keybase because of who was behind it. Just because it's got moneyed people running it doesn't mean they won't sell once their priorities change.

If you have one person giving a lot of money to an organisation, that person might be tempted to use their influence to change the direction of said organisation.

If you have millions of people giving a small amount of money, chances are the organisation will try to preserve the users' best interest.

Now I get it that the person who gave a lot of money also happen to be the interim CEO, but you gotta start somewhere.

I hope signal and signal foundations stays along for a long time, would be good to model it around Wikimedia Foundation. https://wikimediafoundation.org/about/financial-reports/

I think 501c3s should be barred from taking huge donations like that in situations where it's not 100% clear that such a donor couldn't end up personally benefitting from influencing the charity. For example, I stopped giving money to Wikimedia Foundation when Google showed up with their millions. If there is even just a 0.0001% chance that donations from my hard-earned cash will ultimately just end up lining the pockets of billionaires, then I don't want any part of it.

In Germany there is now a party running on a program trying to forbid political parties from taking donations from any individual above €5000 per year, and barring politicians from staying in office longer than two terms of 5 years each. -- This is roughly the standard I expect from any charity that wants to have any shot at getting money from me.

He co-founded the foundation. The die has been cast.

The guy's worth 2.5B. I sincerely doubt he'd go to all that trouble to just make even more money. There are easier ways, with less scrutiny.

I don't think it's hard at all to imagine scenarios where his other assets could benefit from a player like Signal competing with Facebook, even if Signal is non-profit.

This is similar to how Google Docs competes with Microsoft Office. It hurts Microsoft's cash-generation and thus benefits Google as they compete with Bing.

If Google had been even smarter (or poorer, so as not to be able to afford footing the bill for Google docs entirely on their own), they could have established Google Docs as a 501c3 foundation, benefitting from tax exemptions and donations from individuals and just dominated that foundation through large donations and putting the right people in charge.

This may or may not be an accurate analogy for Acton's true motives with Signal, but I just can't know the truth of it and am therefore not taking that risk with my cash.

Hearing about Wikipedia's deceptive fundraising messaging [0] made me question all donations to large non-profits -- but I guess a 30-people org is a different matter. Plus, Signal doesn't seem to be aggressive about it.

[0] https://www.dailydot.com/debug/wikipedia-endownemnt-fundrais...

This deserves more attention.

When the WMF announced the creation of an endowment with the Tides Foundation in January 2016, on Wikipedia’s 15th birthday, its goal was to accumulate $100 million over 10 years, as “a permanent source of funding to ensure Wikipedia thrives for generations to come.”

Just five years later, the endowment passed $90 million, and the $100 million mark, now described as an “initial goal,” will be reached this year.

https://www.influencewatch.org/non-profit/tides-foundation/

Which partly explains Wikipedia's political stance.

> The Tides Foundation is a major center-left grantmaking organization and a major pass-through funder to numerous left-leaning nonprofits.

The fact that they declare themselves center-left is not a violation of 501(c)(3)?

No? What provision do you think are they violating?

Why would it be?

I forget the precise rules on political activity, but when the IRS investigated what was (blatent, IIRC) violations of it by right-wing organizations several years ago, the right and GOP pointed their propaganda cannons at the IRS and its head, a non-partisan public servant, making it clear that such rules were not to be enforced (and the rule of law is inferior to the GOP).

Would you please share some links to more info about this?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IRS_targeting_controversy#:~:t....

It should be easy to find plenty, but here is one from the end of the saga:

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/05/us/politics/irs-targeting...

What you're quoting is InfluenceWatch's description of the Tides Foundation, not their description of themselves. Their own description (from their About page) is "Tides is a philanthropic partner and nonprofit accelerator dedicated to building a world of shared prosperity and social justice."

IANAL but declaring a political leaning is not the same as supporting a candidate for public office. Many, many political 527s have an associated 501(c)3 or (c)4 to handle donations for their charitable work, like the obviously left-leaning MoveOn.org.

> Which partly explains Wikipedia's political stance.

I'm curious to hear what you think Wikipedia's political stance is?

Take the large number of science articles that have become politicized. Next, please name a couple of them that don't support the left side of the argument.

If by "the left" and "the right", you're thinking of US political definitions, please name a couple of politicized scientific disputes where the right-wing side of a scientific argument has merit.

I can think of one family of scientific subjects where the "progressive" side is almost as unscientific as the "conservative" side, and a particular case[0] where the "progressive" agenda was loudly denying the scientific state of the art.

But I cannot think of any cases where the "conservative" side had actively better scientific grounding. But that, of course, is probably due to my bias, my thought bubble, etc. So please, if you can rise to the standard you're setting, I'd like to learn about it. (If nothing else, almost all of my friends and family are left of me, and it's nice to be able to reality-check them, when social mores permit.)

[0] I'd provide my example, but I'm sufficiently afraid of progressive culture to not want to discuss the particular case under my own name. But I checked WP on the subject, and while it's not incredibly detailed either way, I don't think it supports the progressive side of the case w.r.t. the science. (In my assessment, the alleged progressives were wrong about the science in this particular case, although they may have been right about everything else, I dunno.)

A relevant example of this is COVID. It became politicized, with [some of] the left taking the "we must vaccinate all infants and become hermits indefinitely or everyone will die" position and [some of] the right taking the "vaccines are harmful and useless and the virus is just a cold" position.

Neither of these positions is The Truth, as usual, but the result is that some of the things the right has been saying have been accurate but previously disparaged. For example, the difference between dying of COVID and dying with COVID, or accurately pointing out that the large majority of fatalities have been people with comorbidities.

> A relevant example of this is COVID

This is literally an irrelevant example because it's not related to Wikipedia. New, evolving science (especially as it intersects with many governments' policies) is always going to be wrong to some degree.

Doesn't Wikipedia have articles about Covid?

Yes but it doesn't say anything about vaccinating infants or any of the other strawman nonsense that the person I replied to was saying.

> This is literally an irrelevant example because it's not related to Wikipedia.

rel·e·vant /ˈreləvənt/

closely connected or appropriate to what is being done or considered.

appropriate to the current time, period, or circumstances; of contemporary interest.

> New, evolving science (especially as it intersects with many governments' policies) is always going to be wrong to some degree.

Now this is an irrelevant criticism. Nobody asked for an example that isn't in dispute.

New, evolving science is the thing you would expect there to be the most political disputes over because the uncertainty causes people to believe whatever most benefits their coalition.

There is the left narrative, and then there is everyone else.

The classic example is CAGW. If I know a person's position on that, I find I can predict their position on most any other contentious issue.

The average people on the street have plenty of received opinions that they are happy to share, but know little about the actual science relevant to them.

But, we were discussing Wikipedia science articles. The issue with Wikipedia is what is permitted to be said on some science pages, and what is quickly reverted.

Everyone is political. Good scientists (and good encyclopedists) ought to try hard to suppress that.

>The classic example is CAGW. If I know a person's position on that, I find I can predict their position on most any other contentious issue.

In case anyone was curious, it seems to stand for "catastrophic anthropogenic global warming" [0] (or Citizens Against Government Waste, which seems an equally stark signifier of the invoker's political position -- who better to exemplify "waste, fraud, abuse, and mismanagement in government" than, uh, Bernie Sanders?!).

"CAGW", for "catastrophic anthropogenic global warming", is a snarl word (or snarl acronym) that global warming denialists use for the established science of climate change. A Google Scholar search indicates that the term is never used in the scientific literature on climate[104][105] except in reference to denialist tactics.[106]

[0] https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Global_warming#CAGW

Ok, I can guess your positions on the issues now ;)

It’s not a “snarl” word. It’s an acronym which is used because the whole fully qualified set of words is too long.

All four words are necessary to state what’s being discussed. Anything less is trying to deflect the debate.

Working backwards, Warming: it’s a rare scientist that thinks the world isn’t warming. We are still coming out of the last ice age. Fifteen thousand years ago, there was ice a mile thick where I’m sitting. We are also coming out of the Little Ice Age. A couple of centuries ago, you could walk from Manhattan to Staten Island on the ice in the winter.

Global: local climate change happens all the time. No one disputes that. The discussion is about global climate change.

Anthropogenic: significantly caused by humans, specifically by emitting excessive CO2. This is theoretical, because by itself, CO2 can’t account for the projected warming. There must be a feedback to the real greenhouse gas, water vapor.

Catastrophic: The amount of warming is going to alter the global climate to the point that the Earth’s ecology and human civilization will be seriously affected.

The last two points are in scientific dispute. The computer models, which have many knobs, predict a bad outcome.

Historic satellite measurements of the global tropospheric temperature show that nothing unusual is happening. The increase is 0.14 C per decade.

https://www.drroyspencer.com/2022/01/uah-global-temperature-...

It appears to me that the CAGW hypothesis is disproved.

Global climate change is a topic for some very interesting science. The solar system's position in the galaxy, for example. Or, the effect of the sun on the intensity of galactic cosmic rays.

The climate models can't address even recent pre-industrial global changes.

A "snarl word" is a neologism for the age-old practice of the creation of derogatory labels by people who are trying to dismiss things without the listener realizing they don't have good cause.

>The last two points are in scientific dispute

I don't think that's true. I think that a casual google will show that climatology is actually in overwhelming agreement that human activities are driving climate change, and here's one I did earlier [0]. To the reader: this is a testable hypothesis!

>It appears to me that the CAGW hypothesis is disproved

Argument by personal incredulity isn't always a fallacy. Sometimes, smart people are intuitive and well-informed enough to jump directly to conclusions without needing to cover the intervening intellectual distance. Maybe this is happening here, and I'm just not an exceptional person, but if I were you I'd consider wondering why the likes of Dr Roy Spencer and I couldn't turn our ability to outthink entire scientific disciplines to a more profitable end.

The issue is that stupidly oversimplified models from 40+ years ago have been borne out, sourced from both capitalist and Soviet science [1][3]. By all means, there are many, many inputs into the grand planetary system, but the inconvenient truth, if you will, is that atmospheric CO2 increases seem to track with temperature increases, in both modeling and the historical record. I think, by "many knobs", that you're trying to suggest there are many variables that can be tweaked -- nope! It's actually very straightforward. Are there complex, "more realistic" climate models that produce unorthodox results when their knobs are twiddled? Probably! But for every one of those you fixate on, remember that there is one big, simple one that continues to track with the thing we're trying to measure: observable reality. Bald-faced denial of observable reality is a pretty good signifier that some aspect of science has been politicized, whether in a Wikipedia article or in a congressional hearing.

You've made a lot of claims, but haven't really backed any of them up, or even explained them; "CAGW" is pretty clearly a snarl word.

[0] https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/ac2966

[1] https://eos.org/features/a-50-year-old-global-warming-foreca...

[2] https://xkcd.com/1732/ <- "This is just a temperature chart!" That's right, but its sources, which track the CO2 rise, aren't

[3] https://www.climatefiles.com/exxonmobil/1982-memo-to-exxon-m...

If there are a large number of these articles post a few examples. Posting articles where "the left side" and the scientific consensus happen to align is cheating of course. There are a lot of those.

I am not OP but I would cite the covid-19 article: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COVID-19

There is research to support all kinds of propositions regarding the vaccine's efficacy and safety. Of topical consideration is its efficacy in reduction of transmission. The article has been scrubbed (and all updates are being removed) which cite the current research that the vaccine is less effective at reducing transmission against more recent strains of covid-19; and especially compared with typical live-attenuated and inactivated vaccines.

Citation: https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/nejmoa2108891

Further, all citations have been scrubbed (and all updates are being removed) which explain that mask efficacy in reducing transmission for children is questionable at best, and also demonstrably harmful.

Citation: https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/...

Further, all citations have been scrubbed (and all updates are being removed) which explain that vaccine efficacy wanes rather quickly compared with typical live-attenuated and inactivated vaccines.

Citation: https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMoa2110345

Further, all mention of "natural immunity" has been scrubbed (and future updates are being removed) discussing the reality that those who have already recovered from covid-19 possess natural immunity to the virus which is at least as effective as vaccines.

Citation: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8627252/

These are all relevant and credible citations to an article discussing many aspects of the virus, yet they are being actively removed.

I feel the need to postface my comments with the disclaimer that I love vaccines and have three covid-19 vaccines already, and am prepared to receive more. My comments are purely to provide a relevant and factual example to support OP's premise that there is some form of bias present in moderation of Wikipedia now. This bias is extremely difficult to quantify and qualify because there are millions of layers of bureaucracy built into Wikipedia's moderation system. It is almost ungovernable now, and those who have attained sufficient power and coordination can and do use that power to affect bias.

This is extremely interesting, and explains my experiences with the obvious shift in moderation to an Americanised left-leaning perspective. It has been quite jarring to see something I had so much trust in undermined by America's identity war.

> Turns out it's donations

Are they still doing the crypto scheme? I stopped donating when that started, but would be more than happy to pick it back up if they reversed course.

They just rolled it out globally, https://www.wired.com/story/signal-mobilecoin-cryptocurrency...

This feels more interesting than most cryptocurrency uses. One thing a cryptocurrency can be is an open protocol for payments - it makes sense to try and make one into such a protocol. The privacy preserving aspects of MobileCoin are interesting and feel like they fit with Signal too.

I am ridiculously negative on all things "crypto", but person-to-person payments (in fiat) are currently pretty annoying and limited (at least in the US, even with things like Venmo and Zelle), and integrating private payments with a privacy-preserving messenger would seem to be a good thing. I don't know if MobileCoin is the best solution here, but I also don't see Signal starting partnerships with big traditional banks or payment processors, either (and wouldn't really want to see Signal in bed with those sorts of folks). So something like this might be the right move, even though I'm unlikely to use it myself.

> and wouldn't really want to see Signal in bed with those sorts of folks

Why?

This has been ongoingly why we have bad encryption technology. No one wants to taint their ideological purity by trying to solve problems for organizations that can pay for them which would actually solve problems for private citizens, and simultaneously ensures that good technology doesn't secure important social interactions for private citizens.

Why should I not be able to verify I'm talking to my bank through Signal? Why can't I have messages from my local government secured to me via Signal?

It's a 2-sided problem, and one side is this bizarre rejection of any attempt at enterprise marketing for a platform with enterprise utility.

Because we all saw where it leads with Google/FB. They might start by just doing the simple things you proposed. But once a government or bank is a customer, they would be the largest/most powerful customers by far. Meaning Signal would begin to bend to doing what those customers want, maybe collecting analytics or personal information, or selling your contact data to advertisers. Maybe one of those banks donates money to Signal and wants favors in return.

The biggest customers of a company inevitably shape the incentives and behavior's within that company. easy to dismiss as a "slippery slope fallacy" but it's historically true. No one who's using Signal to get away from the shitty enterprises that built/own FB Messenger wants a repeat of the same thing. Even if you don't agree, many Signal users probably do, and it would be silly for Signal to piss off their customers.

IIRC the privacy aspect relies entirely on Intel SGX (Which isn't really unprecedented for Signal) which is not ideal. Since it's centralized anyway, I would rather have seen a blind-signature based payment system. It would be more private and probably more efficient.

It doesn't rely on SGX for privacy: https://developers.mobilecoin.com/faq

From what I remember reading, without SGX it is reliant on an older model of Monero that is missing a critical newer mitigation that prevents people from decloaking upwards of 80% of transactions due to a timing bias in how older transactions are selected for including in the ring signature.

Do you have reason to believe MobileCoin scales any better than any other open blockchain protocol? I doubt it.

Also, payments with free floating crypto like MobileCoin and bitcoin really isn't practical in most of the western world, due to the requirements of capital gains tax reporting, not to mention the instability of the price.

MobileCoin is seriously behind the ball on this, even though it's a problem being actively solved on bitcoin's lightning network, https://seekingalpha.com/article/4459757-biggest-bitcoin-dev...

That’s right and I stopped using Signal for that reason. Tax authorities have every right to look into any account that facilitates transactions in taxable assets (even just to confirm that no transactions have taken place)

I have nothing in principle against crypto currencies and I am very much in favour of strong privacy for personal communication, but mixing the two is obviously contradictory. It completely defeats the purpose of Signal.

also, MobileCoin is a permissioned blockchain with four nodes. It's the embodiment of "it's just a slow database."

Do you have a source for this?

https://web.archive.org/web/20210408011945/https://www.mobil...

That was as of last April, the page has now been removed.

I'm not sure. I'm a bit torn on that. If they can sustain themselves though some method, that's good, but I would rather that method be aligned fairly closely with their initial goals of security and privacy, which crypto pays good lip service to but it's always the best at achieving, given public ledgers.

I guess I'm just worried about perverting what makes it a good messaging client, and would rather they get money from people that support that cause so they aren't as tempted to chase some other path because the alternative is to shutter.

That said, that can happen even if they can sustain themselves through donations if the management/board decide to do so. Just have to hope it stays the course.

I did the same thing. I had setup a monthly donation to Signal several months before the crypto announcement. When I heard about the crypto thing I cancelled my monthly donation.

For me I stopped using Signal when they started permanently storing sensitive user data in the cloud, they were extremely unclear about doing it confusing many of their users, they ignored the objections and security concerns of their users who realized what they were doing and they never updated their privacy policy to reflect that information (and still haven't). For an app that insists that you be able to trust it, they just did not come off as remotely trustworthy.

Do you have anymore info on that?

Good sources to read?

Here are a bunch of threads I found:

https://community.signalusers.org/t/proper-secure-value-secu...

https://old.reddit.com/r/signal/comments/gmwheu/introducing_...

https://old.reddit.com/r/signal/comments/hkl914/welcome_to_t...

https://old.reddit.com/r/signal/comments/giqxug/whats_happen...

https://old.reddit.com/r/signal/comments/hkle3d/forced_pin_b...

https://old.reddit.com/r/signal/comments/ghsj5b/pin_cloud_st...

https://old.reddit.com/r/privacy/comments/hm2fwx/why_i_think...

Signal then announced that because of all the hate they'll make the feature optional, but opting out would just set a pin for you and upload your data anyway. This also caused a bunch of confusion.

https://old.reddit.com/r/signal/comments/hnok10/moxie_on_twi...

https://old.reddit.com/r/signal/comments/hrlmoe/pins_now_opt...

https://old.reddit.com/r/signal/comments/hoh7e9/moxie_marlin...

/u/PriorProject has a comment far down which sums up my view pretty well in this one:

https://old.reddit.com/r/signal/comments/htmzrr/psa_disablin...

It's worth pointing out that they're collecting the type of data they still brag about not being able to turn over because they "don't keep user data".

https://signal.org/bigbrother/eastern-virginia-grand-jury/

In fact, this was posted just one month before all this went down: https://signal.org/blog/looking-back-as-the-world-moves-forw...

Between that and not updating their privacy policy it's a pretty massive red flag, but so many people don't even know about the data collection. Look at the answers this guy gets:

https://old.reddit.com/r/signal/comments/q5tlg1/what_info_do...

same with the top comment here:

https://old.reddit.com/r/privacy/comments/qpb8eh/mlat_order_...

It's insane, and I hope every user who has to learn what signal is really collecting from some random internet comment thinks long and hard about what that says about how transparent and trustworthy signal is.

> Are they still doing the crypto scheme? I stopped donating when that started, but would be more than happy to pick it back up if they reversed course.

Yes it seems they are still doing the MobileCoin thing. I'm against cryptocurrencies, blockchain, NFTs, etc also, but nothing is forcing me to use it. I'd be curious to read some case studies or blog posts about how it is being used. For example, are people using it to pay for milk in rural India, send money to family in Myanmar, split dinner bills in New York?

Regarding donations, I would be happy to donate, but it would be great to see some financial reports. Other initiatives like Software in the Public Interest (SPI) and the OpenStreetMap Foundation publish yearly reports, which makes it easy to see how the projects spend their money, how much cash they have in the bank, etc. Pardon me, but I don't want to donate to Signal if they still have $50 million in the bank, or if their CEO is taking home a huge salary, or if they spend the money on fuse-ball tables. ;)

Also lichess.org publishes yearly reports

Oh wow, I read the post and thought congrats Moxie, job indeed done. We are still not there, so a lot of empathy for the feelings behind that :)

... Except if it is donations and esp. Brian Acton's, or even say Firefox with most of their money being one Google or Bing search bar deal... the sustainable business isn't there yet. A replacement CEO can be good just for that. Marlin as a CEO found amazing product/user fit, and as a tech leader, hired enough and built enough for a great dev culture. But there is no sustainable product/customer fit yet, esp if they view the user as not the established product: the market isn't paying. A CEO focused on solving that would be quite healthy for achieving sustainability! Hopefully Brian and his successor will have more room now to figure that out, it's not easy, esp given their privacy mission!

(And still congrats and a lot of respect to Moxie for building something people want & helps security, and growing a team to deliver it, and everyone else for pushing into the next phase!)

I just stopped my signal donation today, which I've been doing monthly last year due to this:

https://amycastor.com/2021/04/07/signal-adopts-mobilecoin-a-...

Was it an overreaction? I don't think so. I feel dumb stuff like this, massive conflicts of interest, happens too often these days, and I'm voting with my wallet.

The Signal Foundation is in Benevity, which powers lots and lots of corporate gift matching. I give a yearly matched donation each december as I try to reach the max matching for my company.

Thanks for pointing this out, I had no idea it existed. Uggg I just made some donations last week which look like they could have benefitted from this.

For my company at least there's a very easy interface for declaring donations for matching post hoc; sometimes it asks for a receipt. Totally fine to use it in January, too; it's a head start on this year's donation goal...

Amazon Smile also has signal foundation as a non profit.

Thanks for pointing that out, wasn't aware of it, just subscribed too.

I went through the same process. Acton gave them a huge foundational base, but you want it to be a viable model in its own right.

I too took to donating through the app so that I could get the icon. My donations continue through their website, but it's also important to spread the word to folks like you that Signal needs funding to continue its mission!

I just went to donate but at least on Calyx, I do not have Google Pay installed. I just checked their blog post and they will add other payment methods in the future so I hope I can become a sustainer too.

Thanks for the suggestion. I just set up an in-app recurring donation to get my profile badge too

They are planning to integrate their own sketchy crypto-coin, I think they will get money from that. Although not sure how is that going, haven’t heard about MobileCoin for months now

I'd like to see an annual report before donating a single buck

With the integration of MobileCoin, Signal has a potential web3-style path to sustainability.

https://www.wired.com/story/signal-mobilecoin-cryptocurrency...

No, this is very bad news and could end up with end-to-end encryption being outlawed in the name of preventing money laundering https://www.theverge.com/22872133/signal-cryptocurrency-paym...

No, this is very good news, because it reveals the essential equivalency between privacy-for-speech & privacy-for-commerce.

Personal privacy for commerce is great, but for money laundering I'd compare that to paying for political influence in the way that it mixes up speech and money in a bad way.

And yet, both kinds of privacy depend on the same freedom-of-technology. If you give up your privacy-of-commerce based on fears of 'money laundering', your privacy-for-speech is probably already dead.

100% agree with you here! Privacy is privacy, it doesn't matter what the activity is. Most money today is just digital information, no different than that text message being sent. It seems impossible to allow complete privacy when sending one type of digital information but not another.

I could send someone the recovery keys for a bitcoin wallet and launder money via any messaging service. If we need to regulate that then privacy goes out the window, you'd have to know what the content of my message was to know if it was allowed.

I agree with all of that.

But I consider that bundling to be a bad thing.

And I wish large-scale money laundering was easier to deal with in a privacy-preserving way.

I consider entropy a troublesome thing. I wish it could be reversed. But, the universe is how it is. Privacy is general-purpose, and the things you can do with it resistant to unbundling.

Yes.

And because privacy-for-commerce is morally wrong for almost all definitions of morality, then I guess privacy-for-speech is also morally wrong.

I totally support your right to live in a surveillance police state of your own choosing – far from people who prefer privacy & freedom.

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